[Tfug] Alan Cox: "I've had enough"--what else is new?

[Joe Roberts]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 3:42 PM, <bpoag at comcast.net> wrote:

> Seriously. And yes, I mean seriously, a number of us would be well-suited to
> start to think of "free Unix" as something other than Linux, something other
> than mucking around with GNU tools. You know how economists always take
> forever to acknowledge the obvious, like that we're in a recession? Same
> thing applies here. We're in a post-Linux era, now. It simply no longer
> makes sense to declare a "movement", and then watch it fumble around without
> direction.

You're not the only one who feels this way.  I don't really have any
opinion on it.  I come in here each day and things mostly work.  Video
editing is pretty bad, but that's my only complaint.  Occasionally
things break, but not often enough that I think about it.  I watch
youtube videos, play some games, write e-mail, use some astronomy
software, browse the web.  The lack of "direction" is just not
something I notice but I'll take your word for it.  I use what I use,
and it seems to work alright.  I don't have anything against Macs but
I don't see what the big deal is either.

> The Linux era ended when we had no answer for Vista's awkward silence. Vista
> face-planted on the stage, and the spotlight quickly moved over to Linux.
> And what did we have? Nothing. Two divergent projects that weren't ready for
> prime-time with near-zero high quality commercially-supported software to
> make the switch desirable enough.

I guess if you look at it as an effort to get a lot of people to
switch over, I'd say that if you couldn't make it happen when Vista
came out and Microsoft was at its most vulnerable, you probably will
never make it happen.

It's just that I don't care.  One of the main reasons this seems to
concern people is they want commercial software for Linux and the idea
is that if you had enough people running it on the desktop, you'd have
that.  The major virtue of Linux, for me, is that I don't have to pay
for software or deal with registration codes or go through the whole
hassle of pirating it.  So if suddenly you had millions more Linux
desktops and Adobe released Photoshop, I still wouldn't use it.
(Exception: a good video editing suite.)

For all the complaining (and 95% of everything you read about it is
complaining), The Gimp quite literally meets every need I have.  Is
the interface goofy?  I think I thought that when I first installed it
years ago.  But I'm used to it and don't think about it now, any more
than I think about writing HTML in a text editor since I ditched HTML
editors.

I get the point that this attitude doesn't work for a lot of people
and I respect that.  I just don't care, and I suspect a lot of other
Linux users don't either.   My main concern is having a robust command
line/shell, and for me, 6 of one, half dozen of another.  Darwin,
FreeBSD, Linux, or Solaris - all of these work fine for me so long as
I'm not paying for them.

It just doesn't occur to me to want much more from my desktop than I
get.  I have a Windows desktop I use for work, and that irritates me
on a daily basis - I certainly don't want it to be more like Windows.
As for the Mac, okay, it looks nice and I wouldn't complain if I had
to use OS X.  But I sure wouldn't start paying for shareware again
either.  I'd wind up running most of the software that is conceivably
part of what people complain about in Linux (like the Gimp).

> Worse, people are beginning to realize that code developed under the open
> source model isn't immune to the same "shelf life" principles that
> closed-source code suffers from. I mean, think about it. All the code people
> wrote even 6 or 7 years ago when Linux was still more or less a quietly cool
> thing people did for fun....Practically none of it works anymore, at least
> without uprooting and fundamentally screwing your installation by
> interspersing it with old library versions, patches and hacks. It was all
> for naught.

In the 7 years I've run Linux, this simply hasn't been an issue.  I
did want to install Mosaic once for shits and giggles and got that
working okay in a VM.  I don't disagree that what you say is true, but
I guess I just use my system differently.  xmess/xmame is one of the
few things I use that may fall under this category, and I hear there
are some forks which are modern modern, but haven't looked into it.

> Who wants to do that?

I never do that, but if I did, it would probably annoy the crap out of me.

> I have a hackintosh now. It's BSD, it's kernel is free, and it's fun.. It
> is, IMHO, what Unix should be, and what a constantly pissy/disagreeable herd
> of cats like the Linux community will never, by its very nature, ever be
> able to produce.

I guess.  KDE3.5.10 works fine for me.  It never crashes.  I reboot
maybe once every 6 weeks to upgrade the kernel.

I've read your posts before on this issue and I'm not taking issues
with anything you say, except that they're just things that don't seem
to affect me.  I use so many systems every day anyway that in terms of
things like UI consistency, I just don't notice.  It is a fundamental
usability concept that interfaces ought to be intuitive and that to be
so they should be consistent.  But I've never used computers that way.
 I always adapt to whatever platform I'm using and in a short time I
don't think about it anymore (a good example is the weird
right-click-to paste convention in PuTTY).  If I cared - if things
annoyed me regularly, I'd probably look for something else.

I don't know how many Linux users are in the same camp.  I could go
through the effort of building a Hackintosh, but I'm just not annoyed
enough with Linux to make it worth the effort.  Or switch to FreeBSD,
which is a similar concept for me.

Had I started out with a Mac or FreeBSD, I probably would have stuck
with either.  But instead I started here.  Works for me.  If it
didn't, I'd move on to something else.